Pills laced with deadly opioid infiltrating drug market, DEA says

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Pills laced with deadly opioid infiltrating drug market, DEA says

The illegal drugs look like known prescription painkillers and
contain high amounts of fentanyl as law enforcement says
problem is expected to escalate

Susan Zalkind in Boston
Sunday 24 July 2016 17.35 BST

Hundreds of thousands of counterfeit prescription pills laced with a deadly synthetic opioid have infiltrated the US drug market, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration, with the problem expected to escalate.

The pills are pressed using pharmacy-grade machines to look like known prescription painkillers that an increasing number of Americans addicted to opioids seek to buy illegally. They contain various amounts of fentanyl – a synthetic drug between 50-100 times more powerful than morphine. Even a few extra grains of the drug can prove deadly. Often law enforcement only determines they are counterfeit after they are taken to a laboratory for testing.

Potent, unregulated, and, to the untrained eye, indistinguishable from pharmacy grade medication, the counterfeit pills put people who use painkillers for non-medical purposes – 4.3 million in 2014 according to the last federal survey – at risk of accidentally taking a far more potent drug than intended, to often fatal consequences.

“It’s a huge concern, people don’t know what they are getting,” said DEA spokesman Melvin Patterson, citing an uptick in accidental overdoses by unwitting users.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/24/counterfeit-prescription-pills-laced-deadly-opioid-fentanyl

[tblue37]

1. Are these pills only being sold illegally, or could they also end up being unknowingly

dispensed by pharmacies?

IOW, is there any danger of their entering the legal market and being taken by people with legitimate prescriptions?

[tblue37]

2. To answer my own question, I think there is some risk, though it might not

reveal itself immediately.

This time, the epidemic is being sourced by chemists in Chinese laboratories. The DEA report reveals that many of these laboratories also produce pharmaceuticals that are sold legally in the US.

Just as Chinese suppliers sold dangerously adulterated cat food to US stores, I imagine some will try to increase profits by supplying US markets with these pills, since the same companies are manufacturing both the legal and the illegal versions of the pills.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. A well understood and documented effect of prohibition.

Misguided policies that kill far more people, damage far more lives than the prohibited drugs would if they were legally available.

[Crunchy Frog]

4. Not just addicts.

Huge numbers of chronic pain patients are being cut off of their medications, and some are turning to the black market in desperation. An entirely predictable outgrowth of the new Prohibitionist stance regarding opioid analgesics.